Denmark

**Author(s):** Ehret, S; Constantino, S; Vogt, S; Weber, E; Efferson, C &lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;Introduction: Social tipping can accelerate behavior change in domains from social justice to climate change. When people vary, however, heterogeneity can undermine tipping in unexpected ways. &lt;br&gt;Methods: We ran two experiments. For both, participants faced incentives to coordinate. After they had established a coordination norm, an intervention created pressure to tip to a new norm by incentivizing some participants to change behavior. The first experiment examined polarized identities around the 2020 U.S. elections by using either neutral labels for choices or partisan political images. The second experiment varied both the size of the intervention and the specific individuals targeted by the intervention. &lt;br&gt;Results: The payoff-irrelevant relabeling in the first experiment generated extreme differences. Neutral groups evolved norms slowly before intervention but transitioned to new norms rapidly after intervention. Political groups evolved norms rapidly before intervention but persisted in a state of costly disagreement after intervention. The second experiment showed that the social gains of behavior change depend on strong interactions between the size and target of the intervention.

Cultural Evolution Society 2022

Activating cultural change for good (?) in heterogeneous populations

norm change; coordination; conformity; outgroup aversion

cultural evolution; policy and cultural evolution; behavior change; social tipping

Welcome to the Cultural Evolution Society (CES) Conference 2024, which was a hybrid conference held at Durham University (UK). The conference was hosted in Durham by the Durham Cultural Evolution Research Centre (DCERC) with administrative assistance from the CES Transformation Fund team.

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#### Durham Cultural Evolution Research Centre (DCERC) 
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
**Interdisciplinary study of cultural change and diversity**

We are a highly interdisciplinary group of researchers using evolutionary models to study cultural change and diversity. We apply cultural evolutionary methods to a wide variety of topics including cognition, innovation, social learning, technology, art, music, narrative, religion, sociality, language and communication. We have a growing interest in applying cultural evolutionary theory to current societal challenges such as understanding the spread of prosocial health behaviours and health conspiracies. 
**[Discover More](https://www.durham.ac.uk/research/institutes-and-centres/cultural-evolution/)**

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Cultural Evolution Society Conference 2024

The field of cultural evolution is growing in size and scope; its theories, methods and applications - both academic and applied - are getting ever more robust. Do join us in what promises to be an exciting exchange of ideas and a celebration of our field.

**Author(s):** Ehret, S; Constantino, S; Vogt, S; Weber, E; Efferson, C Introduction: Social tipping can accelerate behavior change in domains from social justice to climate change. When people vary, however, heterogeneity can undermine tipping in unexpected ways. Methods: We ran two experiments. For both, participants faced incentives to coordinate. After they had established a coordination norm, an intervention created pressure to tip to a new norm by incentivizing some participants to change behavior. The first experiment examined polarized identities around the 2020 U.S. elections by using either neutral labels for choices or partisan political images. The second experiment varied both the size of the intervention and the specific individuals targeted by the intervention. Results: The payoff-irrelevant relabeling in the first experiment generated extreme differences. Neutral groups evolved norms slowly before intervention but transitioned to new norms rapidly after intervention. Political groups evolved norms rapidly before intervention but persisted in a state of costly disagreement after intervention. The second experiment showed that the social gains of behavior change depend on strong interactions between the size and target of the intervention.

technical paper

### Welcome to the fourth Cultural Evolution Society Conference, CES2022! 

As last year, Underline will support the online component of the conference. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is causing a great deal of uncertainty for all of us. Therefore, we seek to offer a hybrid format that will hopefully allow some folks to travel to Aarhus, others to meet up locally or regionally in CES hub-lets, and other yet to participate online. The field of cultural evolution is growing in size and scope; its theories, methods and applications - both academic and applied - are getting ever more robust. Do join us in what promises to be an exciting exchange of ideas and a celebration of our field.

##### ***For SoMe interaction and live tweeting please tag @CulturalEvolSoc and use #CESconf2022***


#### The CES 2022 local organising committee
* Luseadra Joy McKerracher
* Jesper Sørensen 
* Niels Nørkjær Johannsen 
* Benjamin Grant Purzycki 
* Mette Løvschal 
* Felix Riede
* Iza Romanowska 
* Karsten Olsen

Please click on the button bellow if you want to watch the videos

**Author(s):** Adamson, J.; Wilson, E.O. In this paper we explore how hominin behavior responds to the distribution of resources in territorial conflict. We develop an economic model to organize the findings of primatologists, isolating how resource skew and variance affect territorial ranges, as well as how they interact with unequal appropriation abilities. Testing the predictions for humans in a controlled laboratory experiment, we find that observed behavior clusters around the equilibrium predictions and all comparative statics have the predicted sign. We also find that equally strong appropriators choose more exclusive and less overlapping ranges than predicted with symmetric resources, and weaker appropriators choose more engulfed ranges than predicted with skewed resources. (Unpublished Working Paper available online at https://ssrn.com/abstract=4053185)

The Geography of Resources, Conflict, and Territory in Hominins

**Author(s):** White, C. J. M.; Muthukrishna, M. We tested whether sharing socioeconomic status predicts cultural similarity between residents of different nations, such as whether elites share in a “global culture” or whether certain cultural variants are characteristic of low SES. We used the cultural fixation index to examine cultural distance between members of socioeconomic groups living in 88 countries, according to the set of cultural beliefs, values, and behaviors assessed by the World Values Survey (2005 – 2019). Overall, within-country cultural distances between SES-groups (defined by education, income, or self-reported status) were small, and between-country cultural distances were no more similar if people shared the same SES. However, highly educated respondents were consistently more culturally similar to people in the USA. This pattern was not found when SES was defined by income or self-reported status, and education did not predict cultural similarities to other global superpowers (e.g., China or Russia). Results show the global spread of Western values through formal education and imply that cross-cultural studies recruiting college-educated samples are likely to under-represent the world’s cultural variation.

Higher education predicts worldwide cultural similarity to the United States

**Author(s):** Kelly, Daniel; Brownstein, Michael Consistency is an abstract but important social value. We first distinguish logical consistency, the kind of relationship that can hold between sentences or propositions, from that what we’ll call ethical consistency a kind of ideal that people can aspire to in themselves and their social interactions. We’ll then examine the roots of people’s concern for ethical consistency. We distinguish two families of accounts of this concern. The first holds that consistency is a precondition for the realization of different forms of cognitive and moral sophistication. On this “universalist view,” a drive toward consistency is inherent in the nature of cognition, action, and morality. Agents who aspire to be autonomous, self-governing individuals will inevitably endeavor to maintain consistency across actions in different settings, and between their present intentions and future actions. This version of the ideal of consistent even lies near the heart of Kantian moral theory, and exerts influence on contemporary extensions of it. A second view holds that ethical concern for consistency is a culturally evolved value associated with Western individualism, the most extreme versions of which are parochial to WEIRD cultures. This “localist view” sees variability across time and culture in concern for consistency-related virtues like integrity, authenticity, sincerity, etc. as evidence that not all forms of consistency are inscribed in the innate machinery of the human mind, let alone mentality in general. Rather, cultures have evolved different norms to govern individual actions and social interactions, some of which put a premium on values like authenticity, while others prize situational fluidity and the ability to calibrate behavior to different social contexts. After articulating and providing examples of these two views, we evaluate their strengths and weaknesses. We conclude with an argument in favor of the localist view, based on the idea that even in WEIRD cultures that prize it, achieving ethical consistency is a constant struggle rather an automatic result of having a mind, and social pressure and collectively enforced norms are required to maintain it. We end with some reflections on these issues made from a normative ethical perspective rather than an empirical one, situating our discussion with respect to recent normative debates about the value of code-switching and a program of moral education that teaches social fluidity and cultural fit.

The Ethics of Consistency: Authenticity, Code-switching, and the Social Norms of Self-Presentation

**Author(s):** None INTRODUCTION: Scientific debate on the evolutionary function(s) of music has lately intensified with leading theories highlighting its capacity for social bonding & credible signaling. Crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic provide ideal opportunities for establishing selective pressure on music behavior. This talk synthesizes empirical evidence collected by the global MUSICOVID network to argue that contextually tailored musical innovations may help humans endure societal struggle.
 METHODS: Representative survey data from FR, DE, IN, IT, UK & US (n=5,113) during Apr-May 2020 were subjected to LightGBM modelling to predict socio-emotional coping via music from behavioral changes. A corona-themed music video database (n=465) was crowdsourced. Sentiment was quantified in tweets (n≈16M), subreddits (n≈53K), Spotify playlists (n=10K), YouTube comments (n=125K) & news articles (n≈46K).
 RESULTS: Music aided coping for ~50% of people, being superior to many other strategies. Widespread interest in coronamusic was by far the strongest predictor of successful musical coping, and a functional bifurcation emerged between negative- & positive-experiencers using music for solitary mood regulation and as a proxy for social interaction, respectively.
 CONCLUSIONS: These data provocatively suggest that topical music may have been adaptive in building resilience during human evolution.

Topical musical innovations may have helped humans endure societal struggle during the coronavirus pandemic and beyond

**Author(s):** Nakamura, E; Singh, R While previous studies on music evolution focused on analysis of trends in features in historical data, construction of a mathematical model that can predict the evolution of the distribution of musical products remains as a challenge. This is especially because the distribution of music styles in a society has a complex structure consisting of clusters that dynamically change.
To understand these complex dynamics, we developed statistical modeling methods and analyzed two large datasets of popular music created in Japan and the US.
We found that intra-cluster dynamics, such as the contraction and shift of a cluster, as well as inter-cluster dynamics represented by clusters' relative frequencies, often exhibit notable dynamical modes that hold across different cultures. Moreover, we developed an evolutionary model incorporating these dynamical modes and showed that it is effective for predicting the future creation style distributions.
Our results indicate the importance of an accurate model of cluster dynamics for predicting future distributions of cultural artefacts. The proposed methodology is general and can potentially be applied to other domains of creative culture.

Predictive modeling of dynamic cluster structure of popular music creation styles

**Author(s):** Brooks, RC, Blake, KR, Fromhage, L Resources influence the formation and success of human consortships. Resource distribution within a society should, therefore, influence the mating opportunities an individual of given status/wealth experiences. In particular, in societies both contemporary and historic, women prefer mates of higher rather than lower status and wealth, a pattern known as ‘hypergyny’. Within-sex competition is influenced by an interaction between preferences and the distribution of resources. Empirical studies show that economic inequality within a sex can amplify mating competition, and that inequalities between women and men influence mate competition behaviours, but the links between resource distribution and mating competition have received less theoretic attention. We model hypergyny’s effects on mating competition among men and among women within a heterosexual mating market. Lower mating success of poorer men and richer women (compared with richer men and poorer women) is worsened when resource gender gaps are small or when women out-earn men on average. Within-sex inequality amplifies competition. We consider the implications for cultural regulation of inequalities and mating norms.

How gender inequity and income inequality affect mating markets, and how they may shape culture

 This project is an exploratory study of folk intuitions about the moral domain, conducted in the U.S., China, India and Pakistan. Theorists disagree widely about how to define morality, so the science of morality has no principled way to identify its own target domain. This gives rise to many irresolvable debates. However, new methods in experimental philosophy make it possible to replace the theoretical debate over definitions with an empirical research program, by “defining” morality according to the folk concept, rather than theoretical principles. The study illustrates how the right intuitions can be measured, and how the data bear on the scientific debate. 
Such intuitions evolve culturally, however, so these intuitions may vary too widely for the folk concept to be coherent. To address this, the study spanned the distinct cultures of Western, Chinese, and Indian civilization (N=1,612). A questionnaire elicited judgments of “moralness” for a set of normative claims that represents the scientific debate. Hierarchical cluster analysis was used to distinguish moral clusters from non-moral ones, and to identify sub-clusters within the moral domain. Results showed striking agreement across all samples in the moral domain’s scope, and only minor disagreement over internal structure. This supports the conclusion that the empirical approach to identifying the moral domain is viable.

An Empirical Approach to Identifying the Moral Domain

**Author(s):** Eruchimovitch, I; Michaeli, M; Sarid, A To unravel the roots of the relationship between the Individualism-Collectivism dimension of culture (IC) and market-supporting institutions, we develop a micro-founded model in which the two interact and coevolve. IC and institutions are related indirectly, via social organization: Individuals settle either in the Market, an individualistic, interest-based organization, or in the Clan, a collectivistic, kinship-based organization. In a static model, the size of the Market positively depends on the strength of individualistic inclinations and on the quality of market-supporting institutions. In a dynamic model, where IC and institutions are endogenous, there exist up to two stable steady states, one with a predominately individualistic culture, high institutional quality and a large Market, and one with a completely collectivistic culture, no institutions and a desolate Market. The convergence to each steady state depends on initial conditions of IC. We conclude that contemporary IC and institutions exhibit path dependence and are thus related to the historical conditions in each region. Using institutional and historical data, we provide empirical evidence in support of our model. In addition, we apply the model to a specific historical case: the cultural and institutional divergence between China and Europe.

On the Coevolution of Individualism and Institutions

**Author(s):** Aguirre-Fernández, G; Jett, SC; Carrillo-Briceño, JD., Sánchez-Villagra MR. The blowgun is a tubular weapon from which a projectile (a pellet or dart) is propelled by the force of human breath. In the Americas, blowguns have archaeological records (as iconographic evidence) in Peru and Mexico, dating back to ca. 500 AD. Ethnographically, the use of blowguns has a wide although discontinuous distribution, present in eastern USA and from southern Mexico to areas in the Amazon. The weapon is most widely used and technologically diverse in the tropical forest of the Amazon and Orinoco basins. Particular attributes of the blowguns have been recognized, their distribution and evolution outlined and potential evolutionary pathways have been discussed in meticulous detail in previous papers. For this project, we assembled, updated and homogenised blowgun data for 141 societies in South America from seminal sources; the dataset was then associated with Glottolog data in order to provide comparisons among language groups and plot their geographic distribution. We are currently collecting new primary data from museum collections and integrating a large unpublished archive curated over the last 60 years by SCJ into our dataset. Our ultimate aim is to provide a systematic analysis of blowgun traits (both quantitative and qualitative) in order to test hypotheses on technological innovation and distribution across the world.

Blowguns in time and space

Across the millennia, human groups have evolved specific cultural and psychological adaptations to cope with collective threats, from terrorism to natural disasters to pathogens. In particular, research has identified cultural tightness, characterized by strict social norms and punishments, as one key adaptation that helps groups coordinate to survive collective threats. However, interferences with threat signals that facilitate tightening can lead to cultural mismatches—either too much or not enough tightening. I discuss two examples of cultural mismatches: the COVID-19 pandemic (a case in which collective threat is real, but there is a resistance to tightening) and the rise of populist movements (a case in which exaggerated threat leads to unnecessary tightening).

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